JULIA MCKINLAY
ARTIST & CURATOR

Tell us a little bit about yourself…

I am an artist, curator and lecturer based in Leeds. I have been working as an artist since 2009 when I graduated from by BA alongside other work. I have a studio with East Street Arts in Leeds and I am currently a Lecturer in Fine Art at University of Leeds. I also run Threshold, an open-air space for exhibitions of sculpture in the front garden of a back-to-back terraced house on a residential street in Leeds. Threshold supports artists through selling affordable editions of sculpture. This project is taking a break while I prioritise other my own studio practice. In addition to my work as an artist and teacher, I often work for arts organisations to programme exhibitions and events like conferences. This involves a lot of logistics and careful project management and planning.

I teach three days per week, and I am in the studio the other two days, unless I have other work on at the same time. I try and make the most of academic holidays to focus on my practice. In my studio practice, I work between sculpture, print and drawing. My work incorporates material processes that mimic nature, using chemical reactions, heat, and pressure to make installations that represent semi-fictional environments and question the boundaries between nature and the human-made.

Previous works have represented the back of a snail’s shell, obscure gardens and the edge of the world. Acid-soaked steel molluscs populate my work, their etched surfaces containing organic systems and pathways. Synthetic geology interacts with an ordered world of coils, ovals and voids. Molten slag has erupted from the furnace, frothing and flowing through the shell of a now extinct organism, leaving behind a fossil remnant. Like a soft-bodied creature, my work takes the form of collections that expand and contract within the space available. This can be an artist’s book, a series, or an installation.

My time in the studio might involve drawing, planning exhibitions, writing funding applications or having meetings. I wish more of my time was focussed on making but pursuing this career involves a lot of admin!

I have participated in exhibitions in front gardens, music festivals and public galleries including:

• Leeds Art Gallery (Leeds)
• Bloc Projects (Sheffield)
• Sandford Vitrine (London)
• Threshold (Leeds)
• BLANK_ (Leeds)
• Index Festival (Leeds)
• CfSHE Gallery (Tokyo)
• The Factory (Djúpavík, Iceland)
• METAL (Southend-on-Sea)
• Tritongatan5 (Gothenburg)

In 2021 I was commissioned by Yorkshire Sculpture International to deliver a series of sculpture workshops with Ryedale Community Centre in Wakefield. In that year I was also awarded an Arts Fund Commission by Leeds City College to develop a new sculpture installation and piece of choreography with L3 dance students.

I have also produced an artist’s book titled Feeling the Underside, and participated in international artist residencies at:

• Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory (Japan)
• Village Green Festival (Southend-on-Sea)
• METAL (Southend-on-Sea)
• Joya: arte + ecologia (Spain)
• Listhus (Iceland)
• Skaftfell (Iceland)

What made you choose this career?

Working in the fine art industry is definitely very difficult at times, it can be hard to access funding or negotiate fair pay, or to juggle different types of employment with maintaining a studio practice. To fund my practice, I currently teach in a university, and curate artist-led and gallery exhibitions and projects. This often makes it difficult to prioritise my studio work as these jobs demand a lot of time and energy, but usually I get one or two days per week for studio. I also use my holidays and weekends for studio projects too. It is quite recent that I get to work full-time in the creative industries, I’ve worked in shops, offices, wholesalers and events to keep my career going. However, it is an incredibly interesting and enjoyable career to have, if I am not making art, I get to talk and think about it in my other roles. The difficult times when I am working every day of the week pay off when I get to do a show or a residency, I’ve been able to travel to Germany, Iceland, Japan, Spain and Sweden with my work. It is also a very sociable industry where I make new friends and colleagues who all specialise in something fascinating.

I chose this career because I had a feeling in my gut that making art was the thing I could do best over any other subject, and that with some training I could be a successful artist and that it would give me an exciting life. Learning new techniques at school like woodcarving or soldering metal at school felt natural and easy in a way that little else did. It was physical and involved my whole body and brain. I loved visiting galleries and wanted to be able to make art works that were as good or immersive as those I was seeing in galleries like Tate. I think I knew deep down that I would regret taking a less risky career option that prevented me from making art and so I gambled and went to art school.

Did you go through formal education? If so, what did you study and where? If not please explain your journey.

Yes, I did go to art school. My journey to being an artist is really linked with the art schools I went to as I was able to develop a network of friends and peers that I have gone on to work with professionally. I was also given opportunities for residencies, scholarships and shows through art school that I would not have had access to otherwise. I did A-Levels at school and then went on to do a Foundation Course in Art and Design at Leeds College of Art. This was free because I was under 19, and confirmed that I wanted to study Fine Art at university. Arriving in the studios and meeting other students who were all also interested in art was so exciting and I also felt completely at home. You were treated as a professional artist from day one, and they really helped me to identify what kind of work I wanted to make and which university courses would suite me. I chose to go to Glasgow School of Art to study BA Fine Art: Sculpture and Environmental Art course as I knew I wanted to specialise in sculpture, and it had a down-to-earth feel, while also producing artists that were regularly winning the Turner Prize. I liked that it supported students to exhibit in non-traditional art spaces. I loved my time there and then took a three-year break where I worked to save towards doing and MA in London and in 2012-2014 studied on the MFA in Fine Art (Sculpture Pathway) at The Slade School of Fine Art.

This was full-time for two years which was hard financially, but worth it as it really helped me to push my practice and career forward. I then worked for another three-years in various jobs including selling paper and teaching printmaking before being offered a full scholarship to work on a practice-based PhD at Leeds Beckett University in collaboration with Yorkshire Sculpture International. YSI is an international sculpture festival, and I was part of the 2019 organising team. I was awarded my PhD in 2022.

Did this have a positive or negative impact on your chosen career?

It had a massively positive impact I think, although I do wonder if you become slightly institutionalised as to how to be an artist by going through the art school route. Overall though it has been invaluable for becoming part of various communities of artists that have supported my career professionally since graduating. The art industry is one where friendships are very important as you have to do so much on your own before art galleries become interested in working with you. Working with my peers from art school on artist-led shows and finding funding for each other to do these shows has helped keep my practice going. Art school gave me space and time to fully focus on my practice and gave me access to artists who were lecturers and technicians to learn from. Technicians and workshops are one of best things about art school! It is difficult to access the same resources outside of an institution like a university. I was also awarded some prizes after my MFA which allowed me to travel and make work in Iceland and start renting a studio in London. Just keeping going is so important as it is a very competitive industry. I loved working towards a PhD with YSI, this gave me practical experience of working on an international festival of art but also was essentially three years of being a full-time artist without needing to hustle for other work. My practice flourished in this time, and I was able to embed myself in the artist community in Leeds, where I continue to live and work.

Who inspires you?

So many people: Claire Barclay and Alice Channer for their ability to create huge imaginative installations by weaving together so many materials and techniques. Isamu Noguchi has been a major inspiration for his sculptures for stage and collaborations with Martha Graham, these helped me to work out how to choreograph my own installations. Mira Schendel, Vija Celmins, Louise Bourgious for their beautiful, detailed prints and bookworks. Science fiction writers like N.K Jemisin and Adrian Tchaikovsky for their worldmaking.

What’s the scariest thing about your job and how have you overcome it?

Most recently, I’m mostly scared of not being able to make work I am happy with in the time I have. I have an invitation to exhibit in a biennial in Japan later this year, but I’m really struggling to make progress on my work, and I don’t want such a great opportunity to lead to feeling disappointed or embarrassed. I know deep down that I’ll probably pull something together in time, but it is a constant worry in the meantime. I’m having some sleepless nights and strange dreams as a result! I am teaching part-time in a university and I am responsible for supporting 51 final year BA students which is a lot of pressure and often spreads outside of my working time. I find it difficult to switch my brain to ‘making’ on my studio days after teaching, and often life or other paid employment takes up this time. Teaching uses so much physical and mental energy, but I’m working out how to balance it. It is hard with so much pressure from all sides.

What do you want to change about your industry?

I know many brilliant artists that are not being exhibited or offered opportunities to develop their practice, part of this is due to needing to work to support themselves financially. The art industry favours those with independent sources of income and professional connections. It is so difficult to produce the quantity and quality of work needed and market yourself sufficiently while working to support yourself, to compete with those who can work in the studio full time. There are real problems with how the industry excludes those who do not have wealth, are working class, queer or of the global majority for example. You are expected to present yourself slickly on social media, be constantly making new work, have a studio, be participating in residencies, and showing all over the world to be taken seriously as an artist by curators and commissioners. But how can you do that at any point, let alone as an early career artist without time and money? If artists were consistently paid in line with Artist Union of England rates and were not expected to give so much labour for free so often this would help. The standard should be that you do not work for free as an artist, not that you work for free until you reach a certain level of career progression, which is how it has been in the UK for so long. Otherwise the only artists that do end up being represented commercially or being offered significant commissions are those who already had money and connections to begin with. Appropriate fees and support in accessing funding has improved in recent years, especially in my own context here in Yorkshire where fees and funding is becoming the norm, but there is still a long way to go.

What advice would you give someone who is starting out in your field?

To be persistent and not give up after rejection, it is more common to be rejected than accepted. It is often not a reflection of the quality of your work when you fail to get an opportunity.

Do it on your own, don’t wait for someone to come to you to offer you opportunities. If you want to make work, show work, or travel then find a way of doing it yourself. Use whatever space you might have to put on shows, this might be your front garden or a garage. Find other people who want to do similar things with you and work together. Be generous and help others and ask for help when you need it too. Look at other creatives that you admire and see what they have done in their career to be where they are, I have been awarded residencies and funding though researching the careers pathways of others and applying for similar opportunities. Local charities that support specific geographic regions are brilliant for small bursaries to help with tuition fees.

If you are thinking about going to art school then try and visit as many as possible and ask questions: how many students are there, what kind of studio access is available, what workshops are there, is it brief led teaching or more focussed on independent learning, can you go on exchange, what do graduates go on to do, who is teaching there, what mediums are best supported, how much theory and writing is involved. Each fine art degree is very different; try and find the one that fits you best. But equally, it is up to you to make the most of your time in university, so say yes to everything and make the most of every opportunity.